A Pirate's Life In Risen 2: Dark Waters

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Piranha Bytes' sequel strays from its roots.

By Keza MacDonald

Risen's transformation into a swashbuckling pirate adventure hints at a more accessible approach to role-playing than Gothic developer Piranha Bytes usually takes. Risen 2: Dark Waters is still very much a traditionalist PC-style RPG, but it's one designed to guide players in more effectively without sacrificing complexity. The changes are mostly to do with structure and pacing: where Risen presented you with a massive island to explore right from the get-go, Risen 2 has a bigger world that's fed to you in smaller chunks, gradually opening up as your understanding of the game grows.

Or, to put it another way, you start out as a washed-up drunkard and end up as a pirate captain. Risen 2: Dark Waters is a genuine attempt at a deep pirate role-playing game. It's a mix of treasure-hunting, scimitar-wielding, rum-fuelled action in port towns and on deserted islands, and an overarching tale of supernatural world-threatening powers that will be familiar to any devotee of the first game. It's an interesting synthesis, but in moving away from the return to high fantasy that's currently sweeping the RPG genre thanks to games like Skyrim and The Witcher 2, Dark Waters is carving out a recognisably different identity for itself.

"The Witcher and Skyrim were partly the reason why we thought of another setting," says Deep Silver's Daniel Oberlerchner. "I mean, how many medieval RPGs do people want to play? It's hard to make something distinctive in that setting, especially as The Witcher did a really good job.

"What's cool about the pirate theme is that it's really carried through the entire game, it seeps into every core aspect. It's not just the backdrop for the story, and it's not just been slapped on to the Risen engine. It's part of the skill tree, it's integral to how you interact with people (and not just because of the swearing). We've driven it further than anyone before in terms of how detailed this re-enaction of a pirate's life can be. In most games you're limited to sailing around in a ship and doing naval battles – everybody's done that a hundred times before. We wondered: what would a pirate be doing when he's not on a ship?"

Risen 2 casts you, in the beginning, as an alcoholic, disillusioned version of the first Risen's Unnamed Hero, washed up once again on a sparsely-populated island ten years on from the first game. Tasked with infiltrating the pirate community, his first challenge is to get off the island and find somewhere more populated. This is a gentler introduction than the first Risen's entirely open world, which was explorable in all directions right from the start. It's impossible to escape this first island without at least a rudimentary understanding of how things like equipment and combat work, setting you up for an easier entry into the larger world out across the seas.

"In Risen 1 we made the error that we immediately started off with a complete open world, and the difficulty was medium to quite hard right from the beginning," Oberlerchner explains. "Especially in the US, people were shocked that you could die in the tutorial. It was like a funnel – you could to a lot at the beginning, and your options closed down towards the end. For Risen 2 we've put the funnel upside down, so we're starting out quite linear, and opening out."

The Unnamed Hero's first encounter is with a gnome called Jaffar in a fetching tricorne hat, who can speak rudimentary and obscenity-peppered English that he evidently learned from pirates. "It's pirate-themed, so we're going for a high number of f**ks per minute," grins Peter Brolly of Deep Silver. Risen 2's language is certainly colourful, and happily the variation of accents and dialects is just as broad as it ever was. I'm so sick of hearing totally out-of-place Californians in medieval RPGs that I could have sung when I encountered a boss later on in the demo who looked and sounded like a Yorkshire version of Johnny Depp.

After enlisting Jaffar's help in building a raft, we set off on a disappointingly predictable fetch quest to collect together all the materials, though our spirits are lifted by the personality on display in Piranha Bytes' world. The other gnomes on the island turn out to speak their own fairly rudimentary language, much to "Why can't these little bastards learn to speak properly," he says, with all the affability and openness to foreign cultures of the typical Englishman on holiday. Later, in a sizeable port town where, we see a little more quest variation: sabotaging cannons to blast away a prison wall and free a prisoner for your pirate crew, infiltrating watchtowers, even sending a fully-controllable trained money in through people's open windows to pick locks and loot chests.

Risen 2's world is hand-crafted, which should hopefully give it the same sense of place that Risen 1 was memorable for. There's no procedural generation, no randomly-spawning enemies, no fake doors. Every person in the port town has their own house and their own bed, and they'll get rather upset with you if you try to sleep in it. They have daily routines in which you, too, can take part, taking up a smithing, mining or harvesting job to earn a little extra cash or experience.

It's a little disappointing that there's no actual sailing in Risen 2: Dark Waters, given that it makes such a big deal of its cohesive and believable world. Once you've commandeered a ship, you flit from island to island in a map screen rather than taking on the high seas, which rather undermines the sense of cohesion. Oberlerchner provides good justification, though: try to do everything at once, and you'll end up not doing any of it very well.

"In the beginning, of course we considered it," he says. "But then you're thinking of what you can bring to the table that's more than anyone else has done – should it be more accurate? Shoulds it be a sailing simulator? It was all too complicated. We know our limits at Piranha Bytes: we're a core RPG developer. We have people who can write great dialogue, we have great quest-designers, we have open-ended and believable game worlds, but we don't have the expertise to develop a strategy- or tactical naval battle game.

"It's really important to focus what you're doing. You can try to do everything, but you can't do anything well then. The only people who can do everything right now are people like Rockstar and Bethesda - although I'm pretty sure that Skyrim is not going to be excellent on every level. That's just not possible. There are always limits to what you can do."

Risen 2: Dark Waters is trying very hard to be funny as well as delivering the kind of in-depth RPG experience that its fans are going to expect. Its dialogue is peppered with swears and quips, and you can throw parrots at enemies to confuse them during a battle. This levity sits a little uneasily with the complexity of the underlying game, but it's also refreshing to see a hardcore RPG that doesn't take itself overly seriously, and the pirate theme lends itself more easily to light-heartedness than the deep fantasy that's defining the genre at the moment.

This is a game with a hell of a battle on its hands to win your attention in one of the greatest eras for the role-playing game since the late Nineties, but Risen 2: Dark Waters is doing its very best to distinguish itself from the crowd. It fills the hardcore RPG niche for players who are happy starting off as a nobody rather than an instant superhero – and there aren't many gamers out there who haven't wondered from time to time what a real, deep pirate role-playing game might look like.